Why WordPress? 2

When the new year began, and shortly after my first Contribution Day for design at WordCamp US, I wrote a short essay entitled, “Why WordPress?”

Now after experiencing my first WordCamp Europe and the Contribution Day there for designers, I started thinking more about how WordPress lies at the foundations of a freer world, and I wrote a V2 on the airplane ride back to the States while freehand scribbling on my iPad, too.

As a newbie to “speaking WordPress” let me know how you think this resonates, or not, with how you think of WordPress and design. Thank you! —JM

WordPress prides itself on being a community-made system that competes with the giants. WordPress believes that helping each other succeed lies at the foundations of the Internet. A powerful technology that exists to empower your freedom might seem unlikely these days, but that’s how WordPress got started.

Starting in 2003, a simple solution to make building a website easier evolved into the most common and beloved technology today: WordPress. WordPress is an example of how a focus on simplicity set the course for over a quarter of sites that we know as the World Wide Web today.

The breakthrough moment was when the inventors gave away all of WordPress’ underlying code to the rest of the world for free. By freely sharing WordPress, they soon discovered programmers, editors, designers, marketers, and whole businesses from everywhere ready to join in and make it grow.

With each new community-made revision of WordPress came new possibilities for more people to get on the Web — from the travel blogger all the way to the mega-publisher. As a result, WordPress has become the best long-term investment for your time because of its loyal following and its community’s shared determination.

But times have changed and the biggest tech companies of the world, and also new upstarts, have been looking to control your participation on the Internet. Over time, they have built sophisticated mousetraps to capture you in their comfortable microworlds, and ultimately limit what you can do within their controlled confines.

The complete freedom of WordPress has come with the responsibility to know the underlying code “under the hood” of your site. So today, the WordPress community is hard at work designing coding-free approaches to getting your website going that do not sacrifice any of the power and flexibility of the WordPress ethos.

There will never be any limitations to what you can build with WordPress — the community fights for your freedom. WordPress is betting firmly on a some “assembly required” approach, so that you will always have the flexibility to go beyond what you’ve created. That way, not only does WordPress remain affordable, it remains your powerful Do-It-Yourself tool for the Internet.

What you make in WordPress is yours.

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Absolutely agree John. I think the original gift to the world came from the b2 cafelog project which gave its code away as open source and enabled WordPress to emerge from it. The freedom to own and control the code and flex it to your needs has empowered millions to share their message online, and as we develop the technology and design to make it more user friendly and accessible to an ever wider audience, so we will empower more people with the freedom to “do it themselves” online. 🙂